71% open the letter from their own practitioner: how Alliance Wellness Clinic emails its patients

Selzy keeps the clinic’s contacts in one list per practitioner, each holding that practitioner’s own patients, plus a general list for clinic-wide news. Merge fields put the patient’s first name in the subject line when an email calls for it.

The split lets a practitioner write to their own patients and nobody else. The clinic director’s seasonal letter does exactly that. It reads as a note from her, signed with her name: what changed at the clinic, her hours for the season, an open door for new patients, a request to send a friend or family member her way, and one link to book the next appointment.

That letter opened at 71%, with no unsubscribes. The clinic-wide emails to the general list open at 48% to 53%. Both sit far above Selzy’s own benchmark, which puts the average at 14.8%, and the gap between the two is the lesson. A patient’s inbox is full of offers from every clinic, gym and shop they ever left an email with. A letter from the person who treats them is a different kind of email, and the open rate shows it. Spam complaints sit at 0%, where Gmail asks bulk senders to stay under 0.1%.

The clinic-wide email uses the same idea at a larger scale. Every practitioner gets a photo, a name and their own “Click to book with” button, so a patient picks a person before a time slot.

Any business where each client has their own person can do the same: a clinic, a salon, a tutoring school, an accounting firm. Keep one list per practitioner. Let that person sign the email. Give it one link. Then put its open rate next to your newsletter’s in the campaign report. Every feature on this page is one a new Selzy user gets on day one.